Sergio Bonelli Award Premio Sergio Bonelli
Sergio Bonelli Award Premio Sergio Bonelli
It is with pride, but also with deep emotion, that I find myself celebrating with you the first edition of the award that the director Roberto Genovesi and all the staff of Cartoons on the Bay wanted to name after my father Sergio Bonelli.
or a book, always keeping them at hand, as confirmed by the thousands of ancient and modern volumes and comics that filled (and continue to fill) the bookshops and shelves of the offices and his private home.
An important initiative, which our publishing house immediately backed, also in the name of that curiosity and enthusiasm with which my father followed every expression and evolution of entertainment connected to the culture of the image.
For him, who was also a scriptwriter, images were the most beautiful and effective way to give shape and life to a plot by seeing it move under our eyes, whether it was printed on the pages of a children’s comic, or materialized on the big or small screen.
It is a well-known fact that Sergio Bonelli dedicated his entire professional life (and, in many aspects, also his personal life) to the world of comics, a language traditionally linked to printed paper, to the tactile pleasure of touching, browsing and storing a collection, a magazine
For this reason, he was intrigued by the world of video games, animation films, music video clips, new radio and television versions of comic book characters. For him, any medium was fine to tell a story.
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Roberto Genovesi, a great expert in “drawn literature”, knew his passion well, and so we immediately accepted the oppor tunity to honour the memory of my father, by awarding the Sergio Bonelli Prize to Zerocalcare, a car toonist who is able to transpose his ironic and very personal style onto cinema and TV screens, and to Carlos Grangel, the Spanish artist who has made a fundamental contribution to the visual definition of many characters that have entered the collective imagination. The key word of the third millennium is, of course, “transmedia”: an expressive choice which Sergio Bonelli Editore has also begun to pursue enthusiastically, in the present and for the future, without betraying its own tradition.
